HP Compaq 6510b

The HP 6510b is a compact yet powerful laptop with a high-resolution screen (if you pick the WXGA+ version). It has been labeled "Novel SuSE Enterprise certified" by HP, which should mean Linux runs fine on it.

Setup

Intel Core 2 Duo

Automatic frequency throttling and voltage adjustment can be enabled by loading the acpi_cpufreq module (this one is to be preferred over the Intel Speedstep ones; those will be deprecated soon). Install cpufreqd, which will pull in cpufreq-utils along with it. Set up both utilities, and add cpufreqd as a daemon to your DAEMONS=() array (in /etc/rc.conf, that is).

X3100 onboard GPU

Feature-wise this is an awesome GPU. Opensource drivers that support 3D out of the box. However, it has a problem many of the Intel GPUs have: it will stick to VESA resolutions in the framebuffer. Since the only fitting resolution is 1024x768, that is what you'll when using a framebuffer (on boot, and in a command line environment). You can check what modes the GPU supports like this:

[stijn@lysithea ~]$ cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/modes
U:1024x768p-75

As you can see this is the only resolution. According to the uvesafb FAQ, if that's all you get, not even uvesafb can fix it up for you. For earlier chipsets (865 and 915 for example) tools like 855resolution and 915resolution are available, but the latter does not support the Intel G965M yet.

There are modified PKGBUILDs and patches to fix that, but the URLs provided on this page before don't exist anymore. They allow you to set the 1440x900 resolution, but one needs to dig far deeper into the system to get the system booting in that resolution, it seems.

IPW3945 ABG wireless LAN

You have two choices for this card, either go with the present (and soon to be phased out) ieee80211 stack, or with the successor, the mac80211 stack. Both are present in the Arch kernel from 2.6.22 on. With the former you'll need Intel's proprietary regulatory daemon and firmware, and - last but not least - the driver; the latter does not require any regulatory daemon, but still requires the driver and firmware to be installed.

Note: each driver needs different firmware!

The radio switch is hardware (it sits on the tactile strip), which is pretty convenient. Just touch it and the radio gets enabled. The switch could also be pretty shitty at times, as it will disable radio if you scrape away some dust from the tactile strip.

Broadcom NetLink BCM5787M Gigabit LAN

No setup required, it just needs the tg3 module.

Suspension and hibernation

In the early days, there were a bunch of different hacks that you had to perform in order to be able to suspend/hibernate your 6510b. Nowadays, all you should need is the following:

sudo pacman -S pm-utils

That will install the pm-utils package which contains the programs pm-suspend, pm-hibernate, etc. To suspend to RAM, just do the following:

sudo pm-suspend

...and to hibernate...

sudo pm-hibernate

Pretty straight-forward! There is also a "hybrid", called pm-suspend-hybrid. What this does is that it does everything it needs to hibernate and then suspends the computer instead of shutting it down, as it normally would when hibernating! So if you don't run out of power during this suspended state, you can start the computer up again as if it was a normal supension—if you do run out of power, it would just act like a normal hibernation.

FireWire

FireWire is supported out of the box, however, for FireWire HD support, you might need to load the sbp2 module (that is, if you are using the common stack, since a new one is in the works and already present in the kernel). You have the common stack if you run stock Arch kernels.

AuthenTec AES2501 fingerprint reader

As duly pointed out on the forums, fingerprint readers are more a threat to your privacy than a safeguard. Your fingerprints (unless you are paranoid and type with gloves on) are likely to be all over your keyboard, rendering the 'security' purpose of this device useless. Keep this in mind if you intend to use the reader as a replacement for your password; fingerprints can be duplicated easily with basic stuff (graphite ea.).
There is a utility called fprint available, together with a libfprint library it depends on. Both are packaged for Arch Linux. The fprint program is still called fprint_demo for the moment, but it works :-).
Integration with the login manager seems possible - for that you'll need amongst others the pam_fprint module installed (find a PKGBUILD here). Afer installing the package, run

pam_fprint_enroll

and follow the instructions to scan the finger you want to use for authentication. The next step is to configure PAM. First edit /etc/pam.d/login, and make the first lines look like this:

This will make PAM accept a successful fingerprint scan as a valid login token, if the scan fails, it will fall back to a password. From this moment on, you'll be able to log on with a scan on a tty - enter your username, press Enter, and scan the finger you told pam_fprint_enroll to use as default. Voilà :-).

On the forum you can also find a topic that covers setting up your fingerprint reader with PAM and SLiM, but this is with the aes2501 kernelspace driver.

Tactile strip

This laptop sports a fancy tactile strip, providing some extra buttons as well as volume control (toggling mute and changing volume). I have not tried yet to get hal working for my multimedia keys yet, the present solution works fine. Enter keytouch: The HP NC6320 settings (pre-supplied by keytouch) seem to work just fine for muting & adjusting the volume. The 'Help' key (left to the radio switch) fires up your DE's help center if everything goes well, the button to the right is recognised too (you have to configure it though ;-)).
As a fancy plus, you'll get a nice OSD when you mute/unmute or change volume.

The AuthenTec device is the fingerprint reader, the Hewlett-Packard one is the Bluetooth module.

Issues

People running kernel 2.6.23 on this laptop experience hard lockups when they close the laptop lid. 2.6.22 does not have this problem. It seems also 6710b owners are affected.

This is due to a fix in the ACPI video driver in 2.6.23; however, this messes things up for some hardware... You can fix it by putting this in rc.local:

echo 1 > /proc/acpi/video/*/DOS

More info on this 'fix' can be found on here. It seems this behaviour might be changed again with 2.6.24 (before 2.6.23 the value use to be 1 by default), but until it hits stable there is of course no certainty about that :-).

This issue still presents itself on 2.6.29-ARCH (2009/07)

We cut the phc_vids numbers to half of the original on this Laptop. Could not see performance problem, but the fan hardly started up since then. The CPU temperatur stayed stable at 52-55 C

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/phc_vids
25 14 9 6

cat /etc/conf.d/phc-intel
# configuration for phc-intel
# voltage IDs to be set for all CPUs
VIDS="25 14 9 6"

New XOrg

This section is really straight-forward, but be aware that I don't understand most of this.

After a lot of testing I managed to get everything (keyboard and mouse) running again in the new XOrg. I don't really understand everything that's going on, but this is what you do:

Remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or simply rename it to something else -- just make sure it doesn't get loaded).

Note that "hal" loads "dbus" automatically, so you're probably better off not adding "dbus" at all. Also note that the order of the DAEMONS array does matter. Make sure you put "hal" pretty far back and make sure any XOrg related stuff (such as SLiM) are started after "hal".

Make this directory: /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/

Enter the following into the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi: